This is a good contrarian view of the typical Susan Boyle adulation, which, I’ll be honest, I totally got swept up in.  I put it on facebook and on gchat that I love this woman, and I admit to being deeply moved by the performance.  But then something happened: when she was appearing on the Today show, I realized that I didn’t care.  I just wanted to watch the clip again.  I had no interest in seeing another version of her.  And so it wasn’t really about the person at all, it was about the catharsis that comes from feeling (temporarily) triumphant over my own stereotypes, of being part of a collective effervescence that connects everyone to Beauty and Truth and sees past Differences That Divide Us.  Boyle’s later performances will not be this heightened: they will instead be relatively straightforward musical performances, none of which are necessarily cathartic or moving.

Yet I was still moved by the clip, which, yes, is staged, but I would argue its staged quite cleverly and it is, frankly, still moving.  So what’s the problem?  The problem is that Boyle is a real person and her performance is being instrumentally used by me and by millions of others for a brief emotional moment that is more about moral superiority and self-mastery than  connection or the conquering of stereotypes.  This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if Boyle were a character on a TV show–after all, there’s no moral problem with the cahtarsis we get from Oedipus (to bring back Aristotle).  The problem, again, is that Boyle is real, and this gets to the larger ethical problems of reality television: we care about these people not as people, but as individuals who can bring us certain emotional moments.   That’s all we want from them, and so the moment they won’t bring us these scripted highs, we’re no longer interested.  At least, I wasn’t.  And that’s something I’m fairly ashamed of, and it makes me question my motivations and true attraction to Boyle in the first place.